American Life in Poetry: Column 315

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

We who teach creative writing have been known to tell our students that there is no subject so common and ordinary that it can’t be addressed in a poem, and this one, by Michael McFee, who lives in North Carolina, is a good example of that.

Spitwads

Little paper cuds we made by ripping the corners or edges from homework and class notes then ruminating them into balls we’d flick from our fingertips or catapult with pencils or (sometimes after lunch) launch through striped straws like deadly projectiles toward the necks of enemies and any other target where they’d stick with the tiniest splat, I hope you’re still there, stuck to unreachable ceilings like the beginnings of nests by generations of wasps too ignorant to finish them or under desktops with blunt stalactites of chewing gum, little white words we learned to shape and hold in our mouths while waiting to let them fly, our most tenacious utterance.